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Dear Mr. Riddell,
I recently borrowed your Toward the United Front, the long awaited sequel to the earlier proceedings. Thanks a lot! You announce the publication of an affordable edition – when will this be available?
Allow me to correct a few data on Tan Malaka, whose biography I wrote. He was born in 1894, he left Comintern in 1927 and was executed in 1949 not by the Dutch army, but by the Indonesian regular army.
As for Van Kol, his first name is not Hendrick, but these are Henri Hubertus.
I look also forward to see the proceedings of the third Comintern Congress.
With best regards,
Harry Poeze

I watched your presentation on Worker government (HM Toronto 2012) at Leftstreamed. It was really interesting and. A small comment on how you describe the different positions within the Greek Left. As a member of the coordinating commitee of, I want to say that ANTARSYA is not sumply suggesting insurrection against SYRIZA’s proposition for a left government. Mainly we are trying to open the discussion on how a government of the Left can indeed put forward a program of urgent radical measures, especially regarding our relation to the EU and the Eurozone, and on how any question of governmental power must also be combined with forms of popular power from below. Here are some small comments I’ve written on the subject.

Dear John
We met at the Marxism Festival in London 2006, where you talked to me about Brynjólfur Bjarnason at the Comintern in 1920. I have been writing a blog on the development of the Icelandic working class and the Icelandic left. so I thouight you might like to see this.

Here is a resolution passed by the San Francisco Labor Council in the U.S. on June 8, 2015 in support of the Syriza government in its negotiations with the institutions:

MAY HOPE PREVAIL IN GREECE AND EUROPE

Whereas Greece has been subjected to extreme austerity measures for the past five years by the “troika” (the European Commission, the International Monetary Fund, and the European Central Bank) that have resulted in more than 25 percent unemployment and a contraction of the economy by 25 percent, thereby making it even more difficult for Greece to pay back its loans;

Whereas the austerity measures have focused almost entirely on the Greek working class by lowering the minimum wage, lowering wages, undermining the right of unions to engage in collective bargaining, laying off of state workers, reducing pensions, and imposing regressive taxes;

Whereas the austerity measures have avoided targeting the rich, who have been notoriously delinquent in paying their taxes;

Whereas Greece is suffering a humanitarian crisis where people do not have enough to eat, they have suffered mass evictions, and they have lost the most basic amenities such as health care and electricity, all resulting in a heightened suicide rate;

Whereas economists such as Nobel Prize-winning Paul Krugman have described this austerity program as an “economic and human nightmare,” making the Greek economy “worse than before the program started;”

Whereas the Greek people are overwhelmingly against these austerity measures;

Whereas the radical left Syriza Party was recently elected to head up the Greek government because of its adamant opposition to any additional austerity measures;

Whereas the Syriza government and the “troika” are currently deadlocked in negotiations with the “troika” insisting on additional austerity measures while the Syriza representatives are refusing to accept them because they will hurt the working class even more and because they will push the Greek economy into an even deeper depression; and

Whereas AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka has gone on record supporting the Syriza government’s rejection of what he termed “the failed austerity policy;”

Therefore Be It Resolved that the San Francisco Labor Council supports the Syriza government’s rejection of the austerity measures, and supports its call for the restoration of the minimum wage, the rehiring of laid off government workers, full restoration of labor rights, and its aim to establish economic justice in general; and

Therefore Be It Further Resolved that this resolution be sent to the Syriza government, the General Confederation of Greek Workers, the California Federation of Labor, the AFL-CIO, Change to Win, and independent unions such as the N.E.A and the U.E.

I read Lars Lih’s article on the debate in the Bolshevik Party after Lenn’s return, in which he seemed to be arguing that Lenin had dropped the democratic tasks and shifted to calling for a socialist revolution pure and simple, and that the Boishevik strategy circa 1905 needed no modifications in the direction of the task of establishing the dictatorship of the proletariat. He also seemed to be arguing that Kamenev was right against Lenin, and that Lenin later returned to their position, at least in practice.

I don’t have the scholarship or knowledge of Russian to attempt to prove in detail that this was wrong, but I did and do.

It seems to me that this would seem to be consistent with arguing that Kamenev and Zinoviiev were also right against Lenin in October 1917, and that the dictatorship of the proletariat was not on the agenda and should not have been attempted. To my knowledge, Lenin never called the regime established by the October insurrection anything but the dictatorship of the proletariat, even when it carried out sweeping democratic tasks in a way that no partly bourgeois government, not even a peasant-led one, would have been capable of doing.

Now I notice that this article by Lih is no longer available on this site. Did I hallucinate this article, or was there some political reason why I can’t find it. I hope you continue to make his articles available since I would like to know whether I misread where he was going and even if he was, I think this perspective from such an outstanding contributor to our knowledge deserves to be discussed.

Of course, this is not about whether Lenin or Trotsky was right in 1904 — Lenin was — but whether Lenin and Trotsky were right in 1917, quite a different issue.

Sorry to be so late about this.

Congratulations on completing your heroic task, in its way not unlike the three volumes of Capital.
I hope I can find it here. Will you be at the Liberal-Left forum this year? I would be glad to see you.
Fred Feldman

It’s undeniable that the transition from the Second to the Third International marked a rupture in the socialist movement. One question posed by that rupture: Did the program of Third International represent something completely original, or did it simply restore the traditions of Marx & Engels that the Second International had betrayed? The truth is that it’s not possible to restore something old without simultaneously creating something new. The dilemma is abstract and it dissipates on closer inspection.

However—what doesn’t go unnoticed in Lih’s paper is that in order to justify his view that Lenin was unoriginal, Lih has to gloss over the conclusion that Lenin codified in ‘Imperialism in the Split in Socialism,’ as well as earlier and more broadly in Imperialism: the Highest Stage of Capitalism and ‘Socialism and War’—namely that with the rise of imperialism, opportunism developed social roots within the labour movements of the advanced capitalist countries, and that it was therefore necessary for Marxists to organize themselves into a revolutionary vanguard party. Lih’s paper is full of entertaining anecdotes but he ends up skirting the key question—as well as the Third International’s programmatic clash with the Second International over the colonial question and the peasant question, both of which are well documented in the Riddell Comintern series.

What consequences would the oversight represented by Lih’s argument pose today for the conscious element of the labour movement? The most immediate would be a theoretical justification for reverting to Kautsky’s ‘party of the whole class.’ In Kautsky’s own day that model developed into a means to conciliate the social-imperialist politics of the Second International, which had become rooted in the ‘aristocracy of labour’ that lived off the superprofits from imperialism. However, once again, it’s impossible to restore something old without creating something new. Now, proletarian socialism is in a trough. Even the influence of the labour aristocracy and its reformist and chauvinist brand of socialism has died down. In consequence, rejection of Lenin’s conception of the vanguard party leads to conciliation of the ruling class not indirectly—through a retrograde wing of the labour movement—but through direct adaptation to bourgeois movements and ideologies. For starters, environmentalism…

I have been active in the revolutionary socialist movement in Canada, the United States and Europe since the 1960s. This blog features my current articles and some of my past writings that still seem relevant.
I welcome constructive criticism and discussion; please read the Comments Policy before posting. --John Riddell